Automatic posting to social media

Read more on how to automatically publish your work to social media, including Instagram.

In our previous article about how to showcase your work, we gave you a few hints on what the best blog platform is to use. Based on this information, we found that WordPress is the best option to choose from. In this article we will discuss the possibilities to automatically post your blog postings to social media.

Automation is not everything, right?

It’s a tough question to answer. The options to automatically post your work to social media are limited, even when using WordPress. You can rely on the standard functionality for your website, to post to social media. The options for this, are found using the option Sharing. The next screen offers you the chance to select the options to use.

There is one problem. That is the missing option to share to Instagram or Pinterest. These options are not available. There are ways to work around this, but you have to keep in mind that it will be more difficult compared to a full or paid version of WordPress (these are two different things: WordPress.com offers a hosted blog, WordPress.org offers a content management system for a self-hosted blog (yes, you need a domain and webhosting package for this)).

With the platform IFTT (If This, Then That) you will be able to connect your website to almost any social media platform. Even the ones that are listed in the standard WordPress sharing options.

After you registered at this website, you will be able to create applets. These applets will do the thing you want: posting to social media.

The odd one in this all, that is Instagram. Instagram doesn’t really allow you to post from a WordPress.com hosted blog to its website. Unfortunately, you have to be the owner of a full version of WordPress on a self-hosted website.

Still, this is an important and not to miss platform to use. For those of you who are looking for other ways to automate things: IFTT offers a wide variety of features.

Limited options

We like it, when we can bring good news. Unfortunately, when it comes to the free version of WordPress.com and posting to social media – there is some bad news. Many writers and poets are struggling with ways to automate the process of getting their content on Instagram.

So, these limited options are they a problem? It depends on how you see it. Instead of considering a free WordPress website, you can decide to invest in a domain and webhosting package. This doesn’t have to be expensive. Just search Google for the right provider to use.

Let’s assume, you want to do this, there will be more options available than WordPress’ automatic posting and IFTT.

Before you start exploring, there are a few things to keep in mind. There are a lot of companies claiming they found clever ways to automatically post your content to Instagram. They might seem to function fine, but can lead to a shadow-ban of your account and / or the removal of your account. The options below are not only tested by us, they form no threat to your social media accounts. Meaning: you can post from your website to social media (Instagram) without any problem.

This website offers the chance to use a free or paid account. Of course, there are limitations when it comes to the free account. If you don’t publish more than 30 posts per month, you should be able to use the free version without any problem. If you want more, the price varies from $ 9 to $ 49 per month.

Free forever, that is what Buffer offers. If you are happy to share ten postings per account, you should be able to happily use the free version. More about the pricing of Buffer is available on this page.

To be honest with you, Nelio Content is our favorite. We use this platform to post to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and … Instagram. The best part of this all: it interacts with Buffer as it comes to the posting to Instagram. That is not all. Nelio Content provides a plugin to be used in the full version (self-hosted that is) of WordPress. If you still want to use WordPress.com, you need to upgrade to a paid version. In the free version of WordPress.com, it is not possible to install this plugin.

After installing Nelio Content, you will see extras when you write an article or page for your website.

Too good to be true? Well, just a little. You still need an extra account (Buffer) and perform an action on your phone or tablet. This isn’t something that takes a lot of your time, since the image you want to post and the caption are copied. The Buffer app will remind you to post and the necessary information will be copied to the Instagram app.

Scheduling

With the mentioned options (Buffer and Nelio), there is an extra option to consider and that is scheduling your posts. This can also be done when using Later.com.

There is more…

There is more to tell you, but we have given you a lot to think about, right? The good news: we can help you setting up your website. Take a look in our webshop, to find out what we can do for you. If you already own a website that is self-hosted, contact us for more information on how we can set everything that is discussed in this article up for you.

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Automatic posting to social media

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Read more on how to publish your work automatically to social media, including Instagram.